Hilde Skjeggestad

Hilde Skjeggestad (b. 1960 in Chicago) lives and works in Bergen. She holds her education from the Art Academies in Bergen, Norway, and Poznan, Poland, as well as an intermediate in art history from the University of Bergen.

Skjeggestad has for years had an active oeuvre, with many exhibitions, including the Gallery Langegården, Oseana, Hordaland Art Centre, Oslo Art Association. She has also participatated in various group exhibitions.

Skjeggestad has received numerous grants and is purchased by Bergen Art Museum CODE, the Norwegian Council of Culture and Bergen municipality.

She has also been involved in teaching and has worked as consultant of a number of public art projects, among them the Norwegian Government Building Complex (R6) and University of Stavanger.

WORKS

In Hilde Skjeggestad’s paintings colour are a thematically and physically fulcrum. The basis of her works is both the physical characteristics of the colour, and the reflections and discussions on colours through the centuries.

In recent years she has worked with abstract-organic painting in different shades. From her earlier paintings, which were almost disconnected from the material aspect, she became more and more interested in the materials themselves, and what paint and canvas together might express.

When highly diluted paint merges with an unprepared canvas, it inter-reacts and creates a kind of matted representation of colours. It is not always readily perceived, and the image surface may be seen as dry, “grated” and turbid. But given time, the images begin to live and show complexity in structure and colour.

Her works respond to both light and their surroundings, providing visual variation for the eye of an observer. The process unfolds in time by the changing light, and the degree of variety and drama will vary depending upon the local physical conditions and of the viewer’s state of mind.

Skjeggestad usually works in series, and develop her works in dialogue with the rooms they are displayed. Most of her works consists of horizontal bands of juxtaposed elements. The viewer’s reading takes place by slowly walking from one end to the other.

As the working title for the artistic process in recent years, she has used a quote from the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty: For the art of painting is always within the carnal. Skjeggestad feels the rather insisting and old-fashioned title is highly relevant for her works. Besides, it also draws a line back to a partly bygone era; when paintings were among the central arts, and existential questions were an obvious theme.

To some extent these connotations still follow abstract-organic paintings as a subtext, something she draws on, rather than suppresses.